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It’s exciting to see how during the past few years the VRA community has become more collaborative and standardized. Initiatives such as CCO, CONA, and the new cataloging wiki are all part of a process that has been evolving since before I became aware of these issues, but just in my short experience with visual resource management there have been many new developments.

The larger cultural resource management community is paying attention. Just recently the Getty Foundation awarded the Visual Resource Association Foundation a grant of $26,400 to use towards “Implementing CCO: Standards and Best Practices.” The idea of this project is to develop an international standard that will provide training and guidelines for combining with existing standards.

This obviously signals a greater interest in cross-institutional standards, and the support, means, and interest to implement them.

I posted recently about some of the efforts in the visual resources community to create a more collaborative cataloging environment. One of these is the Wikicatalog, now in beta-testing. The creators of this site have asked me to make some comments about the current configuration and make suggestions.

This is an example of a professional and effective use of the wiki model. It’s publicly accessible, but actually editing records is limited to members of the visual resources community. It is a way to have a record created by one author looked at and vetted by many professionals, theoretically enhancing the level of expertise each time.

The beta model has the record templates in 3 formats: 2 lists and 1 table. I personally prefer the table format in terms of visual presentation and ease of entry. Each work element of VRA Core 4.0 has been input with areas for data to be added. The examples in the beta model have thumbnail images with corresponding URL to a larger jpg, along with descriptive VRA work metadata.

What I like best about this wiki is the easy accessibility of the fill-in-the blanks templates and standardized tools at hand. This became even more of an obvious benefit in reading over my internship journal from the IAIA when I had to create all that metadata. I sort of did the same thing – created a template/spreadsheet and used the authorized standards (AAT, ULAN, TGN, LC) to input the metadata. It was time-consuming. This wiki seems like the first step towards a time in which each institution involved in each metadata/digitization project does not have to start from the ground up.

Wikicatalog does not claim to be a union catalog. For now, it is a way to have all the VR cataloging tools in place – a template for cataloging in VRA Core, links to standards, examples to use for those who need to see how it’s done. Maybe someday there will be enough involvement to make it a repository for sharing work records.

How could this model be improved? Honestly, I think it’s a wonderful start. Once VR professionals do become involved with the project we will see how effective the collaborative effort can be. Until then, in theory I think this is definitely the direction we should be headed.

An interesting thread on the Visual Resources Association listserv caught my attention this week about what was originally dubbed a “professional folksonomy” of visual resource metadata – in effect a sort of wiki version of OCLC for visual resource cataloging. The idea (as with OCLC) is that it is a huge waste of time and effort to recreate work records when the cataloging has already been done by another professional and a record is already held by another institution. Perhaps there is a way to set up a centralized wiki database of basic work metadata accessible by member institutions.

Good idea. Of course there are snags – how are the records vetted for authoritativeness? Who does the work of maintenance and oversight (as someone pointed out, sites like Wikipedia have full time staff, and OCLC certainly does – without significant funding this probably could not get off the ground)?

My impression of the VRA from past conferences and discussions is that even though these ideas have been tried in various forms, there’s no real cohesive cross-institution knowledge of the projects underway or resources available. I heard about several institution-level databases holding such metadata that could be harvested by other institutions, IF they knew about it. From the recent discussion, it seems like the dialogue is not getting this across and there is not enough effective collaboration. From the responses to the original idea I can see that there have been many such innovative projects. Centralizing them somehow seems like a great goal with exciting potential.

Then again, many of the VR folks at the 2006 conference had never even heard of OCLC or were aware of its importance to bibliographic cataloging. Not to negate or patronize VR institutions (there are a lot of unique complicating factors to organizing and disseminating visual resources for sure), but this does seem a long time coming…I’m interested to see where it will go.

I am excited by some recent discussion on the VRA discussion list on a topic near and dear to my heart – next generation OPACs that integrate artworks with bibliographic records by utilizing crossworks between existing standards (LCSH and the AAT, e.g.) and creating unique identifiers for artworks (a problem that seems more insurmountable than it should be). I have followed with great interest the technologies and innovations that may be making this integration closer to a reality.

The Getty Institute has always been at the forefront of this effort. From the Getty Vocabularies to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus and the Union List of Artists Names, they are the art cataloging equivalent of the Library of Congress when it comes to the rules of standardization. There is no doubt that these two entities should work together in the efforts towards universal standards for art collections and libraries. I dream of the day when an OPAC is a friendly, searchable receptacle that holds all varieties of formats and materials and designates their relationships.

The Getty is currently working on a project known as CONA (Cultural Objects Name Authority) which in theory is similar to the LC authority files. According to the website, CONA will create authority records for cultural works found in literature, visual resource collections, archives, and libraries. These will be “unique physical works” (i.e. not music, dramatic works, film, or works of literature). This type of record would help set the groundwork for standardized cataloging of artwork and effective crosswalks between cultural resources and bibliographic records. Exciting.